EATING CROW

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 233 08/12/2013

I'm an adventurous cook and eater, deeply into all kinds of exotic plants, game and offal, but even so crow is something I don't care to eat much of. But eat crow I now must, at least metaphorically, because I need to admit in public that Bill Gates is the best, most serious and responsible of all the digital moguls. That was already becoming pretty obvious by his choice of occupation upon leaving the helm of Microsoft. Promoting the development of vaccines is an unglamorous and pragmatic way to really improve the lot of humanity, far removed from the flamboyant political rhetoric of so many liberal pop and movie stars. Pooling resources with Warren Buffet of Omaha rather than  Hollywood or Wall Street pointed in the same direction, and he's often on the opposite side from the other Silicon Valley moguls when it comes to taxation.

But what has finally prompted me to this corvine repast is Gates's public advocacy of Canadian energy expert Vaclav Smil. A recent Wired magazine interview with Smil (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/) opens by quoting Gates as saying: “There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil”. So, not trendy sci-fi authors or self-help gurus, but someone whose books better promote understanding of the most critical problems we face than anyone else I know.

To be fair to myself, though I've often been critical of Microsoft's design ideas, marketing methods and quality control, I'd never been a hater of Gates the person (unlike those commentators who paint him as a kind of Antichrist). I met him a few times in early days and could talk to tech talk to him - he's a man who's written code - and it's always been clear to me that however adept he became at building a huge business corporation, there lurked within him the heart of a true nerd. And you really need to be something of a nerd to appreciate Smil's works because he's relentlessly scientific and unromantic, interested only in trying to find out what's actually happening, in estimating actual risks rather than preaching or scaremongering.

I first encountered Smil's work in 2008 when asked to review his magisterial "Global Trends and Catastrophes: The Next Fifty Years" for The Political Quarterly  (http://dickpountain-politicalquarterly.blogspot.com/2012/07/global-catastrophes-and-trends-next.html). I realised immediately that here was someone different. Smil is Professor of Environment at the University of Manitoba, but he eludes all the normal cliched labels: neither a green nor a technology booster, neither a capitalist nor an anti-capitalist, he's a *systems* man, identifying and analysing the various systems via which we strive to survive. He explains how much we know and don't know about their operation, what works and what doesn't. And he quantifies everything, especially risk (by comparing with the baseline rate of "general mortality", which for us Westerners is around 0.000001 deaths per person-exposure-hour).

I had to warn potential readers that they won't follow Smil's better arguments unless they're comfortable with log/log scale graphs, but by persevering they'd learn that death in hospital from preventable medical error is a greater risk than smoking, terrorism or car crash, and that young black citizens of Philadelphia could *reduce* their chance of death from gunshot by joining the army. He rarely offers concrete policy proposals, just more rational ways to make decisions: "There is so much we do not know, and pretending otherwise is not going to make our choices clearer or easier... we repeatedly spend enormous resources in the pursuit of uncertain (even dubious) causes and are repeatedly unprepared for real threats and unexpected events". He doesn't moralise or preach and is sceptical of those who do: he argues only from science.

In the Wired interview I mentioned above Smil argues that the demise of manufacturing in the UK and USA will doom us not only intellectually but creatively too, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. When asked whether IT jobs can replace the lost manufacturing jobs he replies somewhat scornfully "No, of course not. These are totally fungible jobs. You could hire people in Russia or Malaysia—and that’s what companies are doing." He admires Germany and Switzerland for maintaining strong manufacturing sectors and apprenticeship programs: "because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts". He points out that Apple commands such huge profit margins that it could manufacture in the USA without destroying its business model, if only it dared stand up to Wall Street: "Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them." He doesn't say whether or not he admires Microsoft, but we know that Bill Gates certainly admires him.